“The Holy Spirit invites us to turn all of the events of our life… into personal repentance and following of Christ.”

THORNWOOD, New York, March 2, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the
text of a homily given Feb. 20 by Father Benedict
Groeschel, one of the founders of the Franciscan Friars of
the Renewal, when he concelebrated Mass at the formation center
of the Legionaries of Christ in Thornwood.

Father Groeschel hosts a
Sunday Night Live with Father Benedict Groeschel on EWTN, directs
the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of
New York, and teaches pastoral psychology at St. Joseph´s Seminary
in New York and at the Institute for Psychological Sciences
in Arlington, Virginia.

Well, brothers and sisters, I’m delighted to be
here and grateful to God that I can talk, because
I came down with laryngitis yesterday. And I wanted to
be with the members of the Legionaries and of Regnum
Christi in a time that obviously is one of great
suffering, of pain, but also of promise.

It happened just by
an unusual circumstance that this little book of mine, The
Tears of God, arrived yesterday. I wrote it and sent
it to the publisher a year ago. The name of
the book is The Tears of God: Persevering in the
Face of Great Sorrow and Catastrophe. And so I brought
several copies with me. It’s hardly a book; it’s a
long essay with prayers, but I hope that it will
be helpful to you all.

And first of all, let me
say that the Legionaries have many friends, and I’ve been
on the phone with a number of members of Regnum
Christi who are friends and associates of mine, especially through
the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, which I am a
faculty member of. And I’m so delighted to know that
the spirit of the Lord is with you in this
time of suffering and that people are holding on.

Now: “You
all need reform!” We ALL need reform! When do we
need it? Every single day, no matter what goes on.
Send anybody around to me who says, “They need reform!”
and I’ll tell them, “Wake up, smarty!” Our divine Savior
says, “The time has come, and the Kingdom of God
is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.” And
that is something that must go on every single day.

When
I was a young fellow, fourteen years old, I saw
a book: The Confessions of St Augustine. And I started
to read it. The only translations were old Anglican translations
in very stilted language: Dr Pusey’s translations. And it intrigued
me. (I skipped over the parts about the Manicheans.) But
the whole story of St Augustine, not only his conversion,
but also his great belief on every page that God,
that Christ, called to him no matter what was happening,
even before his conversion. He wrote, “You called me with
an unheard voice, and you pushed me on with a
hidden goad.”

Right in the first paragraph, there is a
sentence. It almost knocked me on the ground when I
read it: “You have made us for yourself, oh God,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
And down through the ages, the spirit of St Augustine
has guided religious orders in the West over and over
again (St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Dominic, many, many others…
St. Ignatius). And on into modern times. “You have made
us for yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless
until they rest in you.”

And in St Augustine, you read
a great deal about human weakness, about how much we
need every day to be converted. You’ll never read in
St Augustine: “We’ve arrived.” Absolutely not.

And at times, in individual
lives, and sometimes in corporate lives, events occur which are
difficult for us to comprehend, to get our arms around.
And often, not always, but often, the answer is a
personal, individual call to repentance on our part, on OUR
part. And the willingness to go on.

The friars, we
work with kind of the poorest section of society, and
we get along very well with humble people. Right during
the priests’ scandal, this great scandal four years ago, two
of our brothers are walking down Broadway. It’s a little
hard to miss us, you know. (At least we LOOK
religious; I wish we WERE religious.) And this truck driver
with a leather jacket and a handful of keys walked
by the two brothers. He turned around and he says,
“Hey brothers, don’t let the turkeys get you down.”

It’s a
great motto. Now, it’s not elegant, and those of you
who speak English in a second language: get someone to
explain to you why they call them turkeys. (How do
you say it in Spanish? “Pavo” is turkey?)

Now, what goes
on is that each individual soul is called in the
way that the Holy Spirit calls us to turn all
of the events of life –a successes, failures, joys, sorrows,
virtues, and even sins – to turn them all into
our personal repentance and following of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Legionaries of Christ were built and sustained by a
deep Christological theology and devotion. It will stand you in
the best stead at this time. This is not the
Legion of anybody except of Christ.

And I encourage you…
my little book is about this. That’s Christ on the
cover with tears running down his face. This painting was
made in the 19th century. No one knows who made
it, but it shows Christ in the agony, crowned with
thorns, and the tears running down his face. The tears
of Christ are the tears of God. He weeps with
us. He wept in the garden. He wept at the
death of his friend Lazarus. Don’t ever, ever think that
he does not weep even now.

If you look at the
religions of the world, there are unique qualities about each
of them, that were founded by sincere people, far away
from Christianity, and perhaps with the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit in those cultures: Buddhism, for instance. And in those
religions, God never suffers. In the Jewish religion, from which
we come, God gets mad. He gets annoyed. He also
gets happy; he rejoices when things are going well. But
in Christianity, God suffers. An incredible, impossible thought. The absolute,
infinite, divine being, eternal, unchangeable… That he could weep: this
is the mystery of the incarnation. Christ comes and weeps
with us. He suffers with us. We have the unthinkable
reality of a God who dies. Incomprehensible. Theologically, we have
explanations through the Councils of how it could happen, but
it’s a mystery of mysteries. And the devotions of the
centuries, especially of the Sacred Heart, reveal that Christ in
a mysterious way suffers with us today.

Pope John Paul
quoted the French writer Léon Bloy that “Christ is on
his cross till the end of the world in his
Mystical Body.” And so Christ suffers with you in a
very special way.

Years from now, you’ll think back on
these difficult days, and I hope you’ll remember that Christ
suffered with you. Let the cross be your guide. St
Augustine says, “When the cross was first preached to the
few who believed, it was mocked by the multitudes. But
by the power of the cross, the blind saw, the
lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, and even the dead
rose so that even among the powers of this world,
men would come to believe that there is, in fact,
nothing more powerful than the humility of God. Nothing more
powerful than the humility of God.

And if I may
say this as a friend to your community, this is
a time when the face of Christ, covered with tears
and sweat, calls each of us to participate in the
humility of God. Amen.